Explore "The Mountebank Criticizes" by Maxwell Bodenheim on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
/ I lose all sense of profiles, / Strolling through your greys and blacks and browns! / No man bestows his orange robe / Soberly upon your uncoloured pavements, / Rebuking life for being death. / No woman taunts her sorrows / With a coloured haughtiness. / When you take to colours, you are ashamed, / Like pages nibbling at a pilfered tart. / You go back quickly to your coldness. / And since you have no colours on your clothes, / You walk in straight and measured lilts / As befits the seriously blind. / Your women do not stroll as though / Each step were a timid intrigue / Woven into the climax to which they fare. / Pistols, rhapsodies and heavy odours / Drugged the lustre of my time. / Yet, we had a virtue. / We lavished colours on our backs / And ravished our sorrow with brightness / That often gave a lightness to our feet!